I’ve been really sitting with a passage from Hope Deferred by Rev. Dr. Serene Jones. I wanted to share it with you today, Holy Saturday, as I and others commemorate the time between Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Here’s the text in case that’s more helpful for you.
“In contemporary as well as classical discussions of the Trinity, theologians have been hard pressed to give an account of what happens in the Godhead when Christ, a part of this Godhead, dies. What transpires in the Godhead when one of its members bleeds away? Theologians like Moltmann and Luther have urged us to affirm that on the cross, God takes this death into the depths of Godself. The Trinity thus holds it. First person holds the Second, in its death, united with it by the power of the Spirit. But how can the living Godhead hold death within it? The tradition has told us that at this point in the story, our language breaks down, and we must simply ponder the cross and its mysteries.”
“Perhaps the tradition is right, but perhaps its imaginative resources have been limited by the morphological imaginations of its mostly male theologians. Perhaps what we find in this space of silence is the image of the woman who, in the grips of a stillbirth, has death inside her and yet does not die. Consider the power of this as an image for the Trinity. When Christ is crucified, God’s own child dies…And perhaps most wrenching, this is a death that happens deep within God, not outside of God but in the very heart — perhaps the womb — of God. It is a death that consumes God, that God holds, making a grave of the Trinity.”
(Hope Deferred, Serene Jones, pg 242)
Abby the Sociologist Doula 